Spectatorship of paintings by naïve viewers

Abstract

The present thesis proposes a framework for understanding spectatorship of paintings. Specifically, the thesis explores eye movements of naïve viewers on representational paintings over four separate studies. Chapter 1 outlines the framework of spectatorship as described in previous literature. Chapter 2 described the first study of this thesis, exploring how participants looked at portraits when making liking judgments. The results showed that the presence of salient features in the context were positively associated with liking, and greater focus was made to the portrayed faces when the salient features were presented in the context rather than when they were absent. Chapter 3 demonstrates across two experiments that memory representations of painting’s mostly rely on inspecting the paintings theme rather than the context. Only when there is uncertainty the focus on the context increased. The study reported in Chapter 4 explored cultural influence on spectatorship. It did so by comparing British and Chinese participants viewing Western and East Asian representational paintings. Chinese participants were observed to be more influenced by culture (than the British participants), the Chinese spectators presented a
relatively greater likelihood of inspection of the context other the theme, but only during discrimination target paintings from foils. Chapter 5 investigates if emphasizing motif category might influence the spectatorship of paintings, by again testing British and Chinese participants. The results showed spectatorship was influenced by efforts to make the motif explicit. For British participants, making the motif of painting explicit increased focus on the painting. In contrast, for Chinese participants, knowledge of the motif decreased focus on the painting. Finally, Chapter 6 summarizes and generalizes the findings from empirical work in the preceding chapters, and identifies a number of implications for further work.

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